The Study On Chinese Functional Word Le (了) & Its Translations

On the basis of the recent translation studies and the support of Nida's and Higgins' relevant theories, le (了) is adopted as the case to study functional words in this paper. All the study is made on the text of Pride and Prejudice.Le (了), as a functional word, can be divided into le-1 (了-1) and le-2 (了-2). For the differences between them, according to the translations in six versions, the paper firstly makes a separate demonstration and then draws some conclusions on the whole.As for the illustration of le-1 (了-1), the study starts from its general character and has found that the past tense and the perfect in English can both be rendered into le-1 (了-1), though le-1 (了-1) is a perfect marker in Chinese. Such a manipulation of the verbal suffix, on the one hand, is required by the different languages and on the other, is the result of dealing with the semantic focus by the translator.After the study on the generality of le-1 (了-1), the illustration comes to its concrete patterns.The analysis of the translations indicates that for a same original sentence, two patterns "V+DV+le-1 (了-1)" and "V+le-1 (了-1)+DV" both appear in their corresponding translations. As a matter of fact, only one translation is appropriate according to the concrete context. As a result, rinding out the nuance between them is the focus in this thesis. After a hard theoretical inference and a empirical analysis, the thesis concludes that the positions of le-1 (了-1) determine the different semantic focuses in the two patterns, which makes the lasting controversy. Meanwhile, the paper verifies that le-1 (了-1) is a phase complement in the two patterns for the first time.This special aspect is also reflected in the patterns of "V+DV+ le-1 (了 -1)+O" and "V+DV+O". Aiming at the co-existence in the same translations, the author convinced that this is not coincident and an inherent regulation should be found out. With the aid of "Chinese Prosody Syntax" by Feng Sheng-li and "the stress and linguistic rhythm" by Liberman, the paper defines le-1 (了-1) as a chenyinci (衬音词) and the choice of "V+DV+ le-1 (了-1)+O" to replace "V+DV+O" by the translators results from the consideration of the "prosodic equivalence".The proposal of the concept chenyinci (衬音词) is obviously a great challenge, for the existence of chenyinci (衬音词) is the premise of prosodic...